Editorial: A New Breed of Cop, part 3 of 4

Tuesday

Jul 31, 2007 at 12:01 AMJul 31, 2007 at 4:06 PM

Editorial series about police and the mentally ill.

The officers wear pins that read "Crisis Intervention Team." It's a coveted designation for Springfield police, representing what is widely acknowledged as the most forward-thinking law enforcement program in the country for dealing with calls involving the mentally ill.

Springfield is among more than 100 other Illinois departments that have started Crisis Intervention Teams, modeled after the program created two decades ago in Memphis, Tenn. They include the multi-jurisdictional East Central Illinois CIT, which represents Champaign, Urbana and University of Illinois police; and the Southwestern Illinois CIT, a regional program to meet the needs of rural departments. There are CIT officers in Rockford, Naperville and Quincy, as well as in Lake, Madison, McHenry, Rock Island and St. Clair counties.

Notably, no Peoria-area police forces are on the list.

That's not to say local police get no such training, but much of it seems of the old-school variety. In Marshall County, site of April's fatal encounter between a deputy and a suicidal man, Sheriff Rob Russell says his officers are trained at the Police Training Institute. Among other things, PTI teaches cops to determine whether a person poses an imminent danger. But unlike CIT, it doesn't delve deeply into why the emotionally disturbed may be aggressive, or how to keep them from threatening police. Russell said the county gets calls about people with mental issues almost every week.

The Central Illinois Emergency Response Team (CIERT) -- representing Peoria, Tazewell and Woodford counties and municipal departments therein -- has come under recent scrutiny for the shooting deaths of two men during armed standoffs. In fairness, CIERT members' jobs are tactical; even departments that use CIT retain similar teams. Nonetheless, the Memphis model might have something to offer. Just as Peoria County Sheriff Mike McCoy rattles off the physical training CIERT officers get -- bench presses, marksmanship, running with a shouldered weapon -- Springfield Deputy Chief Mike Geiger recites the psychological training his officers receive.

Of particular interest should be CIT's emphasis on non-lethal force, which CIERT officers used unsuccessfully in a Creve Coeur standoff.

Peoria's Police Department may be one of the best equipped in the area to deal with the disturbed. To his credit, Chief Steven Settingsgaard has made an effort to educate officers beyond the basics. In late winter, police met for a day with local mental health professionals and members of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). "It was better than nothing," said local NAMI president Keith Stone.

Settingsgaard, who was approached a few years ago by CIT proponents, is comfortable with Peoria's setup, in which police rely on the mobile Emergency Response Service run by the Human Service Center. "They're full-time professionals," he says.

If the city didn't have ERS to give advice at a crisis scene, "I would be much more excited about creating a team of officers who are specially equipped."

The chief also sees problems with CIT: It ties up officers at scenes, costs overtime to train them, puts liability on police instead of private staff. Given that his police bid for their shifts, Settingsgaard worries that CIT officers would cluster in coveted time slots. "When I reviewed all this and weighed all the pros and cons, it was a step backward for us," he said. Fair criticisms, but so are these:

- The day of extra training Peoria police get is about what many departments, including Memphis, received 20 years ago. It's widely considered inadequate.

- ERS was called out a whopping 642 times last year in Peoria County, mainly by Peoria city police. In just the first half of this year, ERS was summoned to crisis scenes more than 430 times. Given that ERS must cover the whole county and is typically staffed by one person, that's dragging out response times, making officers -- and a person having a breakdown -- wait. The Memphis model cuts response to a few minutes.

- Though overtime is a concern, departments routinely pay to cover shifts while officers train for other special assignments. And CIT training itself is provided for free in Illinois and performed by local experts in the same city.

In Springfield, Deputy Chief Geiger couldn't be more enthusiastic. He says if it was his relative on the receiving end of a crisis police call, "I'd want the most highly trained service." Some departments don't want to go there, "but when I think about our own involvement, it's almost embarrassing it took us so long."

Geiger also notes that, like Peoria, Springfield police bid for shifts, but distributing CIT officers throughout the day hasn't been a problem.

"I just know what works," he says, "and I just know what's right. ... How could you possibly say, 'We don't need it?'"

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